In the Turkish
blockbuster action movie Valley
of the Wolves, an American Jewish doctor in Abu
Ghraib prison gently removes a kidney out of a live and suffering Arab prisoner
and places it into a special vessel with the label “To Tel Aviv”, thus
reinforcing the Israeli-American bond of eternal friendship. Real life imitates
cinema, as we learn from the dreadful story of Palestinian youths being hunted
for their inner organs by that most
moral army in the world, Israel's, as published by
a leading Swedish
newspaper [read its English translation
below]

Donald Boström, a
Swedish photographer who worked in the West Bank in 1992, was tipped off by UN
officials to follow the bloody trail of Israeli soldiers who had kidnapped young
Palestinians and returned their dead bodies five days later “with a slit from
the abdomen up to the chin.” The families in the West Bank and in Gaza felt that
they knew exactly what had happened: “Our sons were used as involuntary organ
donors; they disappeared for a number of days only to be returned in the dark of
night, dead and autopsied. Why did they keep their bodies for five days before
letting us bury them? What happened to their bodies in the meantime? Why are
they performing autopsies, against our will, when the cause of death is obvious?
Why were their bodies returned at night time? Why was this done with a military
escort? Why was the area closed off during the funeral? Why was the power supply
interrupted?”

These questions
continued to haunt Boström. He took gruesome pictures of the returned bodies.
Like Vanunu, he smuggled his films abroad. When back in Sweden, he offered the
story to Dagens Nyheter, a liberal newspaper which, incidentally, is owned by
the Jewish Bonnier family. DN refused to publish it. The story was laid to rest
until now, when the Social Democrat newspaper Aftonbladet decided to let it run.

In Israel, the
reaction was hysterical. The country is in danger of busting its guts in rage.
Huge pressure has been exerted upon Swedish authorities to condemn the
newspaper, to punish the offending author and to beg forgiveness. The Swedish
Ambassador in Tel Aviv, a member of the rich and influential Jewish family
Bonnier who incidentally own the majority of Swedish newspapers, TV networks and
cinemas, expressed her ‘shock and disapproval’ on a website. Her speedy
acceptance of the Tel Aviv diktat misfired. The Swedish government disavowed her
interference with the freedom of Swedish press; the editors of Aftonbladet insisted
on their right to say what they find fit and called for an international
inquiry.

Carl Bildt, the
Swedish Foreign Minister, was discomfited by Israel's intention to cancel his
scheduled visit and had already written in a blog that “such articles can cause
anti-Semitism, and instigation is against the Swedish law”. However, he did not
cry uncle in the way Netanyahu and Lieberman had demanded, while indomitable
Aftonbladet Culture Editor Åsa Linderborg, the true hero of the drama, had sent
two of her correspondents to the area of crime. They confirmed Boströms
findings. Unprepared for such steadfastness, the rage and hysterics in Tel Aviv
rather subsided, facing united front of Swedish public opinion.

It is easier to
express ‘outrage about the old canard’ than to answer the questions posed by
Bostrom. The facts are disturbing, and the accusations are not new. There were
too many reports of such goings on, beside the cases mentioned by the Aftonbladet. Knesset
Members Ahmed Tibi and Hashem Mahmid
accused the Abu Kabir institute of forensic
medicine of expropriating the inner parts of Palestinian corpses. They said that
Palestinian doctors have complained about receiving the bodies of their dead
emptied of their innards. Israeli newspapers reported that in 2007 three
Palestinian teenagers were killed near Khan Younes in Gaza Strip and their
bodies were returned to their parents all cut and brutalised six days later.
Israel often does not even return the dead bodies of Palestinians to their
families but has them buried in a secret cemetery. This causes even more
suspicions.

Worse, it fits
into a larger pattern.

All over the
world, Israel and Israelis are involved in trafficking human flesh, this modern
form of cannibalism. Beside the case of the New
Jersey ring mentioned in the Boström’s
article, there are plenty others.

Turkey: An
Israeli professor Zaki Shapira was arrested in Turkey for allegedly cutting
into live Turks for spare parts, reported the notoriously anti-Semitic
paper Jerusalem
Post.

South Africa:
Another anti-Semitic paper, the New
York Times, reported
on an Israeli trafficking ring active from South Africa to Brazil.

Brazil: An
Israeli officer, Gedalya
Tauber, was arrested in Brazil for inducing the poor to part with their
body parts. He spilled the beans about activity of his fellow countrymen.

The Ukraine:
The Jerusalem
Post reported the arrest of “an Israeli
illegal organ-smuggling ring” that flew their donors and recipients to the
Ukraine.

In many cases,
Israelis were the doctors, traffickers, smugglers and recipients of the body
parts, as the Jewish state is the only country in the world where the state pays
for, and best doctors are legally engaged in, the transplanting of illegally
obtained organs, reported Ha'aretz.
The next step was the evolution of international networks for this sort of
traffic. Jews are well positioned to get involved in this sordid business: there
are many Jewish doctors, there are many ties between Jewish communities in
different countries, and there are few moral inhibitions.

This lack of moral
inhibitions allowed a leading Chabad rabbi, Yitzhak
Ginzburgh, to give his religious permission to a
Jew to take a liver from a goy even without his consent. He said that “a
Jew is entitled to extract the liver from a goy if he needs it, for the life of
a Jew is more valuable than the life of a goy, likewise the life of a goy is
more valuable than the life of an animal.”

Modern Israelis
have forgotten their faith, but have retained this lack of inhibition. An
Israeli business newspaper, The
Marker, has published an opinion piece by an
Israeli lawyer justifying the trade in body organs, for “organs are just
commodity, and so they can be bought and sold like any commodity in an open
market”.

The distance
between kidneys bought and snatched is not that big: if organs are “just a
commodity”, surely it is permissible to take them from Palestinians, just as it
is ‘permitted’ to take from Palestinians centuries-old olive
trees while building the Wall.

Indignation is
easy, but it is not so easy to prove that the Israelis, who do not hesitate to
break arms and legs and pour napalm on schoolchildren, do draw a line about
getting some profit from Palestinian innards. Aftonbladet’s
demand for an international enquiry is reasonable: if the Israelis have done
nothing wrong (beyond murdering hundreds of young men), they have nothing to
fear from an international investigation. Yet Israel refused UN enquiry
commissions permission to visit Jenin after the 2002 massacre and Gaza after the
2009 massacre.

For Israel, the
most upsetting part of this affair was the breach made in the wall. I do not
mean the monstrous Sharon’s Wall protecting the biggest Jewish ghetto in the
Middle East, but the wall of media control which protects it overseas. Jews buy
media all over the world not for fun, and not for profit, but for the influence
it has over minds. This is the case in Sweden, where members of its tiny Jewish
community own newspapers, magazines, publishing houses and even Swedish
Hollywood - Svensk Filmindustri AB.
This media actively promotes the neo-liberal policies of privatisation,
commodification, immigrant influx, dismantling the welfare state – in short,
policies that are good for wealthy Jews.

Israeli
representatives work hard to keep reporting from the Middle East under their
control. A few years ago, the leading radical left magazine Ordfront published a
thoughtful piece Israeli
Regime Directs Swedish Media by Johannes Wahlström,
telling of Israeli meddling with the Swedish press, of Israeli officials going
to newspaper editors and to correspondents. In that article Donald Boström tells
of the dreadful story he wanted to tell, but he couldn’t get through the wall of
pro-Israeli censorship in the Swedish media.

Israel is not the
only country suspected of such nefarious activities. Carla del Ponte, chief
prosecutor at the Hague tribunal for Balkan crimes, wrote in
her 2008 book The Hunt: Me and War Criminals that under the aegis of the Kosovo
Liberation Army, this ally of NATO and the US, hundreds of young Serb prisoners
were allegedly taken by truck from Kosovo to northern Albania where their organs
were removed. Some prisoners were sewn up after having kidneys removed until the
moment they were killed for other vital organs. Carla del Ponte had seen the
house where such surgeries were done and had met with the people involved, one
of whom "personally made an organ delivery" to an Albanian airport for transport
abroad.

However, Carla del
Ponte’s accusation against Albanians did not cause such a stir, and nobody
condemned her as “anti-Albanian”, nor would she care if somebody had, for it is
perfectly all right to be anti-anybody as long as not anti-Jewish. The Jews have
a potent weapon in their “anti-Semitism” label. Or do they?

Could it be that
the useful-for-Israel fear of anti-Semitism does not work like a charm anymore?
This is possible. The Cairo speech of Obama apparently has had no direct
consequences; Obama tried to apply pressure to Israel in order to freeze the
settlements, but in vain. Did he fail? It is too early to judge, asZhou
Enlai was wont to say. Such changes rarely occur by
the wave of a magic wand … they take time. Recent publications on the Jewish
criminal gang in New Jersey, attacks on Goldman Sachs, medals for Mary Robinson
and Desmond Tutu, an award to Felicia
Langer, the collapse of the pro-Jewish socialist
party and the appearance of an anti-zionist party in France, the Boström article
in Aftonbladet – all are small and separate incidents, but together they imply
that the change is coming. Swedes, French, Germans and even New Jerseyans are no
longer afraid of Washington coming at them like sixteen tons in defence of
Zionists, as would have been the case in the days of George W. Bush. Obama even
refused to appoint a new anti-anti-semitic commissar.

This thought
frightens the Tel Aviv government more than anything. If today they let the
Swedes get away with it, tomorrow there will be somebody else, and then the fear
of the Jews will be assigned to the category of unmanly unrealistic fears, like
fear of mice.

Second Ending

More importantly,
Israeli outrage is a proof that - despite
approval for it by radical Cabbalists and neoliberals - transplantation of human
organs is an immoral dreadful thing, too close to cannibalism, and we all know
that. Yes, it is awful if Israeli soldiers tear kidneys out of Palestinians and
kill them afterwards. But it is equally awful, if a kind doctor removes a kidney
out of a Detroit mechanic whose house was repossessed by a gentle banker, or out
of a Ukrainian worker who was sacked by a polite oligarch, or out of an Indian
farmer who has to pay his debt to Monsanto. Every poor man on the planet is a
Palestinian – though the means of his dispossession may vary. This kind of thing
should be stopped. The human body is sacred. These operations are too expensive
and can’t be justified. Mankind should overcome its fear of death. We live and
we die. There is no reason to waste thousands of dollars prolonging a life by
expensive operations if this money can be used for feeding the starving. More
about this later...

___________________________________________________________________

An English
translation of the famous article in a leading Swedish
paper.

Our sons plundered for their organs

By Donald Boström

You could call me
a “matchmaker,” said Levy Yitzhak Rosenbaum, from Brooklyn, USA, in a secret
recording with an FBI-agent whom he believed to be a client. Ten days later, at
the end of July this year, Rosenbaum was arrested and a vast, Sopranos-like,
imbroglio of money-laundering and illegal organ-trade was revealed. Rosenbaum’s
matchmaking had nothing to do with romance. It was all about buying and selling
kidneys from Israel on the black market. Rosenbaum says that he buys the kidneys
for 10,000 dollars, from poor people. He then proceeds to sell the organs to
desperate patients in the States for 160,000 dollars. The accusations have
shaken the American transplantation business. If they are true it means that
organ trafficking is documented for the first time in the US, experts tell the
New Jersey Real-Time News.

On the question of
how many organs he has sold Rosenbaum replies: “Quite a lot. And I have never
failed,” he boasts. The business has been running for quite some time. Francis
Delmonici, professor of transplant surgery at Harvard and member of the National
Kidney Foundation’s Board of Directors, tells the same newspaper that
organ-trafficking, similar to the one reported from Israel, is carried out in
other places of the world as well. 5-6,000 operations a year, about ten per cent
of the world’s kidney transplants are carried out illegally, according to
Delmonici.

Countries
suspected of these activities are Pakistan, the Philippines and China, where the
organs are allegedly taken from executed prisoners. But Palestinians also harbor
strong suspicions against Israel for seizing young men and having them serve as
the country’s organ reserve - a very serious accusation, with enough question
marks to motivate the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to start an
investigation about possible war crimes.

Israel has
repeatedly been under fire for its unethical ways of dealing with organs and
transplants. France was among the countries that ceased organ collaboration with
Israel in the nineties. Jerusalem Post wrote that “the rest of the European
countries are expected to follow France’s example shortly.”

Half of the
kidneys transplanted to Israelis since the beginning of the 2000s have been
bought illegally from Turkey, Eastern Europe or Latin America. Israeli health
authorities have full knowledge of this business but do nothing to stop it. At a
conference in 2003 it was shown that Israel is the only western country with a
medical profession that doesn’t condemn the illegal organ trade. The country
takes no legal measures against doctors participating in the illegal business -
on the contrary, chief medical officers of Israel’s big hospitals are involved
in most of the illegal transplants, according to Dagens Nyheter (December 5,
2003).

In the summer of
1992, Ehud Olmert, then minister of health, tried to address the issue of organ
shortage by launching a big campaign aimed at having the Israeli public register
for postmortal organ donation. Half a million pamphlets were spread in local
newspapers. Ehud Olmert himself was the first person to sign up. A couple of
weeks later the Jerusalem Post reported that the campaign was a success. No
fewer than 35,000 people had signed up. Prior to the campaign it would have been
500 in a normal month. In the same article, however, Judy Siegel, the reporter,
wrote that the gap between supply and demand was still large. 500 people were in
line for a kidney transplant, but only 124 transplants could be performed. Of 45
people in need of a new liver, only three could be operated on in Israel.

While the campaign
was running, young Palestinian men started to disappear from villages in the
West Bank and Gaza. After five days Israeli soldiers would bring them back dead,
with their bodies ripped open.

Talk of the bodies
terrified the population of the occupied territories. There were rumors of a
dramatic increase of young men disappearing, with ensuing nightly funerals of
autopsied bodies.

I was in the area
at the time, working on a book. On several occasions I was approached by UN
staff concerned about the developments. The persons contacting me said that
organ theft definitely occurred but that they were prevented from doing anything
about it. On an assignment from a broadcasting network I then travelled around
interviewing a great number of Palestinian families in the West Bank and Gaza -
meeting parents who told of how their sons had been deprived of organs before
being killed. One example that I encountered on this eerie trip was the young
stone-thrower Bilal Ahmed Ghanan.

It was close to
midnight when the motor roar from an Israeli military column sounded from the
outskirts of Imatin, a small village in the northern parts of the West Bank. The
two thousand inhabitants were awake. They were still, waiting, like silent
shadows in the dark, some lying upon roofs, others hiding behind curtains,
walls, or trees that provided protection during the curfew but still offered a
full view toward what would become the grave for the first martyr of the
village. The military had interrupted the electricity and the area was now a
closed-off military zone - not even a cat could move outdoors without risking
its life. The overpowering silence of the dark night was only interrupted by
quiet sobbing. I don’t remember if our shivering was due to the cold or to the
tension. Five days earlier, on May 13, 1992, an Israeli special force had used
the village’s carpentry workshop for an ambush. The person they were assigned to
put out of action was Bilal Ahmed Ghanan, one of the stone-throwing Palestinian
youngsters who made life difficult for the Israeli soldiers.

As one of the
leading stone-throwers Bilal Ghanan had been wanted by the military for a couple
of years. Together with other stone-throwing boys he hid in the Nablus
mountains, with no roof over his head. Getting caught meant torture and death
for these boys - they had to stay in the mountains at all costs.

On May 13 Bilal
made an exception, when for some reason, he walked unprotected by the carpentry
workshop. Not even Talal, his older brother, knows why he took this risk. Maybe
the boys were out of food and needed to restock.

Everything went
according to plan for the Israeli special force. The soldiers stubbed their
cigarettes, put away their cans of Coca-Cola, and calmly aimed through the
broken window. When Bilal was close enough they needed only to pull the
triggers. The first shot hit him in the chest. According to villagers who
witnessed the incident he was subsequently shot with one bullet in each leg. Two
soldiers then ran down from the carpentry workshop and shot Bilal once in the
stomach. Finally, they grabbed him by his feet and dragged him up the twenty
stone steps of the workshop stair. Villagers say that people from both the UN
and the Red Crescent were close by, heard the discharge and came to look for
wounded people in need of care. Some arguing took place as to who should take
care of the victim. Discussions ended with Israeli soldiers loading the badly
wounded Bilal in a jeep and driving him to the outskirts of the village, where a
military helicopter waited. The boy was flown to a destination unknown to his
family. Five days later he came back, dead and wrapped in green hospital fabric.

A villager
recognized Captain Yahya, the leader of the military column who had transported
Bilal from the postmortem center Abu Kabir, outside of Tel Aviv, to the place
for his final rest. “Captain Yahya is the worst of them all,” the villager
whispered in my ear. After Yahya had unloaded the body and changed the green
fabric for a light cotton one, some male relatives of the victim were chosen by
the soldiers to do the job of digging and mixing cement.

Together with the
sharp noises from the shovels we could hear laughter from the soldiers who, as
they waited to go home, exchanged some jokes. As Bilal was put in the grave his
chest was uncovered. Suddenly it became clear to the few people present just
what kind of abuse the boy had been exposed to. Bilal was not by far the first
young Palestinian to be buried with a slit from his abdomen up to his chin.

The families in
the West Bank and in Gaza felt that they knew exactly what had happened: “Our
sons are used as involuntary organ donors,” relatives of Khaled from Nablus told
me, as did the mother of Raed from Jenin and the uncles of Mahmud and Nafes from
Gaza, who had all disappeared for a number of days only to return at night, dead
and autopsied.

- Why are
they keeping the bodies for up to five days before they let us bury them? What
happened to the bodies during that time? Why are they performing autopsy,
against our will, when the cause of death is obvious? Why are the bodies
returned at night? Why is it done with a military escort? Why is the area closed
off during the funeral? Why is the electricity interrupted? Nafes’s uncle was
upset and he had a lot of questions.

The relatives of
the dead Palestinians no longer harbored any doubts as to the reasons for the
killings, but the spokesperson for the Israeli army claimed that the allegations
of organ theft were lies. All the Palestinian victims go through autopsy on a
routine basis, he said. Bilal Ahmed Ghanem was one of 133 Palestinians killed in
various ways that year. According to the Palestinian statistics the causes of
death were: shot in the street, explosion, tear gas, deliberately run over,
hanged in prison, shot in school, killed at home et cetera. The 133 people
killed were between four months to 88 years old. Only half of them, 69 victims,
went through postmortem examination. The routine autopsy of killed Palestinians
- of which the army spokesperson was talking - has no bearing on the reality in
the occupied territories. The questions remain.

We know that
Israel has a great need for organs, that there is a vast and illegal trade of
organs which has been running for many years now, that the authorities are aware
of it and that doctors in managing positions at the big hospitals participate,
as well as civil servants at various levels. We also know that young Palestinian
men disappeared, that they were brought back after five days, at night, under
tremendous secrecy, stitched back together after having been cut from abdomen to
chin.

It’s time to bring
clarity to this macabre business, to shed light on what is going on and what has
taken place in the territories occupied by Israel since the Intifada began.